On Margins: Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration, builds on the following two premises: that the dynamic of a situated and re-situated perspective is foundational to feminist histories of architecture, and that feminist historiographical approaches destabilize presumptions of fixity that have propelled the writing of architectural histories. Through histories of architectures that emerged from individual or collective acts and experiences of migration, the texts in this collection investigate migration and confinement as drivers for modern architecture and its histories, focusing on works by professionally qualified women architects as well as uncredited makers of the built environment. These architectures of migration bring into view margins — whether architectural, structural, cultural, (geo)political, environmental, or economic. This themed section, as one intervention in the broader “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” collection sited in multiple journals, posits expanded historiographies that emerge from intersections of architecture, migration, and margins. These offer possibilities to restore absences and silences in the historical record and open onto new theorizations and perspectives situated around the world.

This special issue includes the following articles:

“‘Dear Comrade,’ or Exile in a Communist World: Resistance, Feminism, and Urbanism in Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s work in China (1934-1956)”
Sophie Hochhäusl

“On Contradictions: The Architecture of Women’s Resistance and Emancipation in Early twentieth-Century Iran”
Armaghan Ziaee

“Le fonds d’archives Georgette Cottin-Euziol: archive de toute une vie”
Assia Samaï-Bouadiadia

And two book reviews:

“Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1952”
Mary Pepchinski

“Hilde Heynen, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Architecture, Modernism and its Discontents, London: Bloomsbury, 2019”
Kathleen James-Chakraborty